sketch: funeral - denn & doch

Learning German with music and comedy is one of the pillars of the howwedu method.

Learn how to use the German particles denn and doch to express impatience and annoyance with the following sketch from the series of Knallerfrauen, a successful German sketch show starring Martina Hill.

Using amara, we added different subtitles to the original music video. Choose between a regular English translation ("English") and the option "German" which will display the German text and a literal, word by word translation, a decoding. After having watched the sketch for the first time, you can use the interactive transcript to jump right to the sentences you want to practice.

Using the player buttons, choose to display German, English or decoded German below the video. The following transcript is clickable. Click on any German sentence to jump to that point in the video. When the video runs, the current part in both the decoding and the ↓ parallel text further below will be highlighted to facilitate comparison of the different translations when you want to jump back and forth. Click to hide.

The following transcript is clickable. Click on any sentence to jump to that point in the video. When the video runs, the current part will be highlighted in both the parallel text and the ↑ decoding above to facilitate comparison of the different translations when you want to jump back and forth. Click to hide.

So if both particles express annoyance, what is the key difference between denn and doch?

denn vs. doch

There are actually quite a few differences in the use of the two particles, to get an overview of all of them, have a look at our notes on German Grammar. When using them to express impatience, you can simply remember that denn is used in questions, while doch is used in declarative sentences.